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Life Is Too Fast, Too Furious for This Runaway Galaxy

The headshot image of NASA Hubble Mission Team

NASA Hubble Mission Team

Goddard Space Flight Center

Mar 04, 2014
Article
Galaxy ESO 137-001
The spiral galaxy ESO 137-001 looks like a dandelion caught in a breeze in this new Hubble Space Telescope image. The galaxy is zooming toward the upper right of this image, in between other galaxies in the Norma cluster located over 200 million light-years away. The road is...

Our spiral-shaped Milky Way galaxy lives in a comparatively quiet backwater region of the universe. This is not the case for galaxies crammed together inside huge clusters. As they zip around within a cluster, gas can be pulled from their disks due to a process called ram pressure stripping. Galaxy ESO 137-001 is one example. The star-city looks like it is "leaking" as it plunges through the Norma galaxy cluster.

Related Images & Videos

Galaxy ESO 137-001

Galaxy ESO 137-001

The spiral galaxy ESO 137-001 looks like a dandelion caught in a breeze in this new Hubble Space Telescope image. The galaxy is zooming toward the upper right of this image, in between other galaxies in the Norma cluster located over 200 million light-years away. The road is...

Hubble-Chandra Composite of ESO137-001

Hubble-Chandra Composite of ESO137-001

Compass and Scale Image for ESO137-001

Compass and Scale Image for ESO137-001

Zoom into ESO 137-001

Zoom into ESO 137-001

This video zooms in on spiral galaxy ESO 137-001, which is undergoing ram pressure stripping. The sequence begins with a view of the night sky near the constellation of Triangulum Australe (the Southern Triangle). It then zooms through observations from the Digitized Sky Survey...

Animation of Ram Pressure Stripping

Animation of Ram Pressure Stripping

This artist's illustration shows a spiral galaxy as it moves through a massive cluster of galaxies. The galaxy is undergoing a process known as ram pressure stripping, where streaks of bright gas are being dragged out into space by the cluster it is passing through.

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Details

Last Updated
Mar 20, 2025
Location
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Contact
Media

Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, Maryland
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov

Credits

NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA);
Acknowledgment: M. Sun (University of Alabama, Huntsville)

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